Babe's "Naked" Fruit & Veggie Salad ♥

Today's salad inspiration: A "naked" salad: No dressing. Not a drizzle of vinaigrette, not even a splash of lemon juice. What do we think, what makes a salad a salad? Is it the dressing? or what's dressed?

Back in June, a reader forwarded a recipe. (Thanks for the recipe, Mary!) She listed a few of my favorite ingredients for salads, romaine and chopped vegetables plus fresh fruit and dried fruit, coconut and a few nuts. The instructions were simple, "Cut all ingredients in medium pieces and mix together. Very delicious!" The recipe struck me as a fall salad so onto the stack it went until last week when it hit me, Hey wait, this salad has no salad dressing! Sure enough, said Mary when asked. "Actually, I like it without dressing."

My brain got to working. Is it the "dressing" that makes a collection of chopped veggies a salad? Do I ever make a salad without stirring in some sort of something to bind it all together? Admittedly, I was a little dubious – but fully prepared for a new food discovery too!
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Roasted Delicata Squash ♥

The very easiest winter squash to cook, the delicata, here oven-roasted in pretty little half rings.

Say hello to my very favorite "easy weeknight vegetable" -- at least during the fall and winter. It's the delicata squash, see those two long-ish squash in the background of the photo? Those are delicata squash. What you can't see is that these guys are small, maybe six inches long. One squash feeds two or four, no need to pack up leftovers.

And delicata skins are edible, not as soft as a zucchini skin but not as hard as the skin of a butternut squash. This is good news because -- there's no peeling!

And unlike a butternut squash, where you need to worry about How to Cut, Peel & Cube a Butternut Squash and Keep All Ten Fingers. No, not these delicata babies, these baby delicatas. It's easy as can be to slice into a delicata squash, no minute in the microwave required. Just you and a sharp knife. Or hey, a dull knife, you decide.
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Pumpkin Hummus with Honey ♥

Today's healthy hummus recipe: A traditional hummus, turned pretty and slightly sweet with pumpkin.

Once upon a time, back BFB (before Facebook), back BiP (before iPhones, iPads and iLives), there was a food blog which published one hummus recipe after another. Week in, week out, hummus and more hummus and still more hummus. I've lost track of the blog but at the time, I wondered, Who can eat so much hummus?

I'm here to say: it happens! A couple of months back, a Syrian restaurant opened nearby. Their hummus is so creamy-dreamy, I don't want to know how much olive oil it takes to achieve ethereal dimensions.

So last week I set out to use up some of that kabocha squash "pumpkin" I've been roasting. (See Homemade Kabocha Squash "Pumpkin" Purée from Kitchen Parade.) Hummus came to mind -- especially because the textures of roasted pumpkin and puréed garbanzo beans are so similar. Could I actually make a low-cal hummus?
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Favorite Pumpkin Recipes ♥

Just in time for "pumpkin season" – that's October and November in the northern hemisphere – my favorite pumpkin recipes, sweet and savory and everything in between.

BUT FIRST, A FEW FACTS
Pumpkins are for jack o' lanterns, sure -- and Cinderalla carriages and moonlit nights awaiting the Great Pumpkin.

But best of all, pumpkins are for eating! But don't try eating pumpkins grown for Halloween carvings, they'll be watery.

Instead, for cooking, choose anything except a carving pumpkin. In fact, my favorite "pumpkin" is called a kabocha squash (more information below). No surprise, though, pumpkins are part of the squash family.

In 2009 and again in 2011, pumpkins are in short supply. I've been reading about shortages of canned pumpkin purée.

When buying canned pumpkin, be sure to buy "100% pumpkin purée" which is 100% pumpkin and not "pumpkin pie mix" which is pumpkin mixed with spices and other ingredients.

It's easy to make your own pumpkin purée from scratch (recipe below) but canned pumpkin is more economical and, honestly, our taste buds have been trained to "like" canned pumpkin.
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Raw Butternut Squash Salad ♥

Today's salad recipe: It's one thing to eat raw tomatoes and cucumbers and zucchini. But winter squash? When grated small, winter squash is surprisingly tender. Pair it with a little fresh ginger and add some dried fruit for sweetness. This is a salad that will delight the eyes and the tastebuds! A small serving is "low carb" and even a larger serving adds up to only 1 Weight Watchers point (old points) or 2 Weight Watchers points (PointsPlus).

As sweet as vegetables can turn once they're cooked, especially when they're roasted slowly in a hot oven, every once in awhile, "raw" vegetables can really hit the spot.

I first made this salad last fall -- on the very day the recipe was published in the New York Times. I made no notes, I wrote no post, mostly because mid-November didn't strike me as the "right time" for a raw winter squash salad. But I did take a pretty picture and it kept popping up when perusing the photo files for the scores of "work in process" recipes, many which are too "meh" or too "something" to meet my high standards for both A Veggie Venture and Kitchen Parade.

But the first small winter squash are showing up both at the farmers market and the grocery store. They're especially perfect for this raw salad -- because the flesh is slightly more tender, the proportion of flesh:seeds&gunk is high. And just like the Butternut Squash Soup with Mango & Toasted Coconut, it strikes me as a great "transitional" salad, one that spans the season, when the weather is still warm and

And -- Canadians readers, are you there? This would be a great side salad for Canadian Thanksgiving coming up so quickly now, especially with dried cranberries instead of dried currants.
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Chewy Choc Chip Cookies

• 2 cups plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 170g unsalted butter, melted
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg plus another yolk
• 1 cup packed brown sugar 
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract 
• 2 cups chocolate chips

Line cookie sheets with baking paper and preheat oven to 165 C.

Sift flour, baking soda and salt and set aside.

 

In a separate bowl, mix melted butter, brown and white sugars until well blended. Beat in egg, egg yolk and vanilla extract until creamy. Add dry ingredients and stir until combined. Stir in the choc chips (today I used a mixture of small milk chocolate chips, and large white choc melts). Put heaped tablespoon sized balls (shape by hand) onto baking sheets, and leave plenty of space in between as they spread.

 

Bake for 12-15 minutes. They should be lightly brown around the edges, but still look and feel slightly uncooked in the middle. Remove from oven and leave to cool on trays for a few minutes, then move to cooling racks.

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One degree of separation

My husband gave me the 'Gourmet Farmer' series 1 DVD for my birthday earlier this month, and we have been thoroughly enjoying working our way through it. Matthew Evans (Sydney food critic) takes you on a journey as he moves from the big smoke and rat race, to a farm in Tasmania, where he grows his own food, mixes it with the local foodies and cooks up some inspiring meals. If you've ever seen River Cottage (Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's empire), its pretty similar, just as enjoyable, and he calls ingredients by their aussie -known name (zucchini instead of courgette, eggplant instead of aubergine... you get the idea)! Both these guys are great inspiration and source of information for food lovers, or people like us who are eager to increase the productivity of our little farming plot and get that pendulum swinging further in the direction of self-sustaining, rather than supermarket reliant!

http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/gourmetfarmer

Matt Evans introduces his vision for food sourcing:
to either:
 1. grow it himself,
 2. source it directly from the grower, or
 3. source it from someone who knows the person who grew it by name.
The idea is that the food has up to only one degree of separation from the farm to your source, none if you can help it.

This had me thinking. Could we be getting more of our food from growers that we can actually talk to? I headed off to my local butcher this morning, and was pleased to purchase beef that he grows on his own farm in Kotupna (about 40 kms from where I purchased it), and pork that his friend and neighbour grew. 

This got us onto a conversation about free range chicken. He sells Hazeldene chicken, which he said isn't free range, although advised that he can buy in free range chook - but usually cant sell it as well as his Hazeldene's products - for one simple reason. Free range costs more. If I want to buy it, I have to commit to 6kg minimum lots. Better get a deep freeze.

Think about the difference in eggs that come from free range chooks, compared with cage or "barn' chickens. Non-free range eggs are pale and anaemic looking.  They don't have that gorgeous bright orange yolk. And their taste doesn't compare. The same applies for the meat that comes out of them. Do you really want to eat meat from a bird (or any animal for that matter) that has spent its life in a cage too small to build up enough speed to raise a sweat!? Never experienced natural light? Thanks, but I'm not putting that in my body. For me, the argument is ethical, as well as nutritional.

So the butcher tells me this morning that the local supermarket chain selling free range chicken in those bright green plastic trays is in fact, 'gas flushed'. He explained this means that all the air is removed from the meat (kind of like the cryovac process), then preservative gas is pumped back in, which doubles the shelf life. Hmm. Delicious?? Ok... what are my alternatives? Grow it myself. Get the free range from the butcher which has a total kill to plate life of 7 days max. Yep, let's do that.

I'm going to have a go at living Matt Evan's philosophy grow it, get it straight from the grower, or someone that knows the grower. The supermarket will be the exception (the back up plan), not the rule.

Wish me luck!


Snow peas from our friends' garden, picked last night. Total carbon miles = 8.

Eggs from our gorgeous happy girls, including one super sized (101g) laid this morning. Tomorrow's breakfast. This is what I love about nature! Imperfections. Blue egg from the Araucana.

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